For the last several nights W has been coming home from work and immediately retreating to her room with her phone and tightly closing the door, remaining there for the rest of the night. Conversation, if any, has been cool and minimal at best. I am cooking my own meals, doing my own laundry, cleaning the house...and still sleeping in the spare bedroom.
Last night around 10:00 I knocked on her bedroom door. I could hear her shifting around before she said "Come in." I sat on the edge of the bed and calmly explained that I was uneasy about her recent need for extreme privacy and I then asked if she was still in contact with the OM, with whom she had supposedly - for the third time - cut off all contact. She admitted she was still calling him and texting him. Conversation then went something like this:
M: You told me you had stopped talking to him.
W: Well, I did for a while.
M: I'm sorry, W, but "for a while" is not something I can accept.
W: So what are you telling me?
M: As long as you are sharing yourself with another man in any way, there is no chance of any reconciliation. You promised me several times you would stop, yet here you are right back there again. I have too much self-respect to allow another man in our marriage. If you insist on maintaining your relationship with him, I think you need to look for your own place to live.
W: (long silence, then...)So you want me to move out?
M: No, I do not want you to move out. I want you to stop, once and for all, contacting or communicating with (OM) in any way, shape or form. I want you to recognize the potential we have to create a new marriage without all of the past baggage. I want you to see the old me is dead, and the new me gets it; understands the pain you have been enduring. But you can't have it both ways. You can't continue to use him for your emotional needs and use me to keep a roof over your head, food on the table and as a baby sitter for (SS 21).
The rest of the conversation was variations of the above. She still maintained she did "not love me as a wife should love a husband" and that she "lived a lie for the duration of our marriage". After several minutes of this back-and-forth, I said both of us deserved better than what we had given each other, and that I would rather see her happy on her own than miserable and with me. I leaned over, kissed her on the cheek, said goodnight and went to bed.
I know I violated several DB and DR tenets, but I had reached the point where I had to stand up for my basic rights as a husband and a man, and no longer try to ignore the elephant in the room.
H 56 W 48 D27,S21 SS25 SS22 Severely autistic M(#2 for both) 9 1/2 yrs. "I've never loved you" 3/7/2011 Separated 8/7/2011 BITS
